The best thing I can think to say about Mitt Romney is that he’s the most prominent politician named after a piece of baseball equipment since Spikes Washington and Protective Cup Roosevelt.
I guess the next best thing would be that he’s not George W. Bush.
And I guess it doesn’t matter because I won’t be voting for a Republican presidential candidate in 2008 under any circumstances, but Romney said something this week that didn’t sit well with me. Speaking to an audience of retirees in Florida, he said “One of the great things about this land is that we have people of different faiths and different religions, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.”
Why is that, Mitt?
Why would you say that?
I would argue that we need to have a person of intelligence lead the country: a well-read student of history with a lifelong thirst for knowledge and an understanding of cultures other than his or her own. Someone, say, with more than a cursory knowledge of economics.
I would argue that a person of compassion would also be a good leader. This person would understand the old bumper sticker message that no one is free while others are oppressed. He or she would stand up for the unfortunate and reject policies that make life worse for those who don’t have it that good to begin with.
A person of conscience would be nice, too. This leader would make thoughtful decisions and have no hidden agenda. The rest of us could feel certain that our trust in this leader wouldn’t be betrayed.
I could go on and on, substituting all sorts of positive attributes: a person of justice, a person of respect, a person of not-batshit-insanity. The point is, when I think of the qualities that make a good leader, I think of actions, not beliefs.
I think of qualities that translate into benefits for everyone.
If a person of faith has these other characteristics, fine. Be intelligent, compassionate, accountable, just, respectful, and not insane, and I won’t care who or what you worship behind closed doors.
And by the same token, Mitt Romney, don’t pretend that a person of faith automatically has those qualities, and don’t pretend that a skeptic automatically doesn’t.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Fetch, Boehner, Fetch!
Funny thing about dogs. They’ll stand by you even if you’re the most despicable person on earth. A dog doesn’t care if you’re a racist, or if you’re a pervert, or if your incompetence caused a fire at the nursing home—he’ll act like you’re the lord of the universe.
But the same kind of loyalty that’s so admirable in a dog is less so in an elected official. Yet “party before country” is the watchword for those Republican senators and representatives who either refuse to believe Bush started the nursing-home fire or are proud that he did.
Rep. John Boehner of Ohio is opposed to the nonbinding resolution expressing disapproval of the troop escalation in Iraq, and yesterday he had this to say:
“This battle is the most visible part of a global war against terrorists. If we leave, they will follow us home. It's that simple.”
Wow. That is simple. It’s simple-minded, too, though I’m not sure it’s as simple-minded as thinking you can conduct a global war on anything by committing a huge chunk of your military to a single place, especially when that place had a negligible connection to terrorism (if any) to begin with.
Boehner’s remark sure makes it sound like Bush is using American soldiers as bait for new terrorists. I find this too reprehensible for words, but maybe it’s perfectly acceptable for Boehner and Bush’s other family pets. (I can’t remember the exact quote, but Immanuel Kant, who might have been a little smarter than John Boehner, once wrote that when the old men who make the wars have to fight them too, then that would be the end of war.)
If Boehner thinks terrorists are going to follow Americans home from Iraq, then I have a solution. On the way back to America, we stop off at a rest area to go to the restroom, and then when the terrorists are over by the vending machines getting corn chips and pop and pretending not to follow us, we sneak out the back window. It’s that simple!
Sigh. Ever since the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration has been hammering us with the same two messages: “Be afraid” and “We know what’s best for you.” The good news is that more and more people are beginning to see through this horseshit. John Boehner isn’t one of them.
But the same kind of loyalty that’s so admirable in a dog is less so in an elected official. Yet “party before country” is the watchword for those Republican senators and representatives who either refuse to believe Bush started the nursing-home fire or are proud that he did.
Rep. John Boehner of Ohio is opposed to the nonbinding resolution expressing disapproval of the troop escalation in Iraq, and yesterday he had this to say:
“This battle is the most visible part of a global war against terrorists. If we leave, they will follow us home. It's that simple.”
Wow. That is simple. It’s simple-minded, too, though I’m not sure it’s as simple-minded as thinking you can conduct a global war on anything by committing a huge chunk of your military to a single place, especially when that place had a negligible connection to terrorism (if any) to begin with.
Boehner’s remark sure makes it sound like Bush is using American soldiers as bait for new terrorists. I find this too reprehensible for words, but maybe it’s perfectly acceptable for Boehner and Bush’s other family pets. (I can’t remember the exact quote, but Immanuel Kant, who might have been a little smarter than John Boehner, once wrote that when the old men who make the wars have to fight them too, then that would be the end of war.)
If Boehner thinks terrorists are going to follow Americans home from Iraq, then I have a solution. On the way back to America, we stop off at a rest area to go to the restroom, and then when the terrorists are over by the vending machines getting corn chips and pop and pretending not to follow us, we sneak out the back window. It’s that simple!
Sigh. Ever since the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration has been hammering us with the same two messages: “Be afraid” and “We know what’s best for you.” The good news is that more and more people are beginning to see through this horseshit. John Boehner isn’t one of them.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Not Ready For Prime Time
What do Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have in common? No, no, rancid ideology isn’t the answer I’m looking for.
Actually, they’ve both hosted “Saturday Night Live.”
McCain’s appearance was in 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, before he became Bush’s shoeshine boy, before he started pandering to Falwell and Dobson and others of that ilk. As I recall, he was relaxed and funny on the show, but I think I’d have a tough time watching it in reruns, knowing that he’s out there beating the drums for troop escalation and the nebulous “victory in Iraq.”
I don’t remember anything at all about Giuliani’s SNL appearance, and it’s quite possible I missed it. However, the Los Angeles Times had a story today in which Giuliani seems to be auditioning for another guest-hosting gig.
How else can you explain comparing Bush to Abraham Lincoln (and favorably, to boot)? Assuming he did so with a straight face, Giuliani must surely rival Bob Newhart and Steven Wright as a master of the deadpan.
How else can you explain such wry quips as “America is very fortunate to have President Bush”?
Giuliani told a convention of California Republicans on Saturday that he wants to be the kind of president who makes decisions that move the country forward. He admires Bush’s leadership and apparently agrees that the president should be a decider.
Which is fine if the president isn’t making his deciderings unilaterally, if he’s weighing all the sides of an issue and then doing the right thing based on his sworn oath to uphold the Constitution. Right now we have a president who’s ignoring the will of his constituents, dismissing the advice of military experts, abandoning his oath, and flying in the face of common sense.
As a result, he has further destabilized the Middle East, created more terrorists, lined his cronies’ pockets, and done a pretty good impression of the angel of death.
This is Giuliani's role model?
I used to think Giuliani wasn’t a bad guy for a Republican. His reasonable stance on abortion and gay rights made him seem somewhat human. But anyone who thinks America is fortunate to have this president can only harbor a serious hatred of America.
And thus shouldn't be allowed to host SNL again.
Actually, they’ve both hosted “Saturday Night Live.”
McCain’s appearance was in 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, before he became Bush’s shoeshine boy, before he started pandering to Falwell and Dobson and others of that ilk. As I recall, he was relaxed and funny on the show, but I think I’d have a tough time watching it in reruns, knowing that he’s out there beating the drums for troop escalation and the nebulous “victory in Iraq.”
I don’t remember anything at all about Giuliani’s SNL appearance, and it’s quite possible I missed it. However, the Los Angeles Times had a story today in which Giuliani seems to be auditioning for another guest-hosting gig.
How else can you explain comparing Bush to Abraham Lincoln (and favorably, to boot)? Assuming he did so with a straight face, Giuliani must surely rival Bob Newhart and Steven Wright as a master of the deadpan.
How else can you explain such wry quips as “America is very fortunate to have President Bush”?
Giuliani told a convention of California Republicans on Saturday that he wants to be the kind of president who makes decisions that move the country forward. He admires Bush’s leadership and apparently agrees that the president should be a decider.
Which is fine if the president isn’t making his deciderings unilaterally, if he’s weighing all the sides of an issue and then doing the right thing based on his sworn oath to uphold the Constitution. Right now we have a president who’s ignoring the will of his constituents, dismissing the advice of military experts, abandoning his oath, and flying in the face of common sense.
As a result, he has further destabilized the Middle East, created more terrorists, lined his cronies’ pockets, and done a pretty good impression of the angel of death.
This is Giuliani's role model?
I used to think Giuliani wasn’t a bad guy for a Republican. His reasonable stance on abortion and gay rights made him seem somewhat human. But anyone who thinks America is fortunate to have this president can only harbor a serious hatred of America.
And thus shouldn't be allowed to host SNL again.
Friday, February 09, 2007
If Only They Were Afraid To Talk To Anyone At All
I promised in an earlier post that I’d write about what those intellectual heavyweights Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck had to say about Joe Biden and his awkward semi-compliment to Barack Obama, and as you might have already guessed it was pretty entertaining—if the idea of grown men saying things that would embarrass a seventh-grader strikes you as entertaining.
As reported on the Think Progress website, in the process of leading a discussion about Biden’s remarks, O’Reilly said this to one of his guests, whose name I didn’t catch:
“Now you got to feel sorry for us white folks here, because I’m telling you now I’m afraid to say anything. You know, you’re an articulate guy, doctor, but I’m never going to say that. You’re a smart guy. Is that bad if I say you’re a smart guy? … Yes, absolutely, instead of black and white Americans coming together, white Americans are terrified. They’re terrified. Now we can’t even say you’re articulate? We can’t even give you guys compliments because they may be taken as condescension?”
Yeah, I know. Where to begin?
O’Reilly is guilty of pretend-indignation. He pretends he doesn’t understand the difference between condescension (expressing amazement that a black person is articulate) and a genuine compliment. “Is it bad if I say you’re a smart guy?”
Come on, Bill. It’s all about context, and stop acting like you don’t know it. The times when it’s okay to tell a black person he’s a smart guy are exactly the same times when it’s okay to tell anyone the same thing.
“Hey, Bob, you’re a smart guy—settle this bet for us.”
“You bought Microsoft at $5? You’re a genius!”
“Say, Ted—brilliant work on the Henderson account.”
Otherwise, the subject isn’t going to come up very often. Yet judging from his words, O’Reilly is constantly having this internal struggle: “Oh, no—this guy’s black and I’m white. Must…resist…Tourette’s Condescending Compliment Syndrome…”
Most people are just content to have normal grown-up conversation. That includes the “white people” O’Reilly presumptuously claims to speak for. (Honestly—suggesting that anyone should “feel sorry for white folks” because he's a case of arrested development?)
But let’s get Glenn Beck’s two half-cents in here, too. In the course of a similar discussion on his CNN program, he said
“I don’t have a lot of African-American friends, and I think part of it is because I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation, and I would say something that somebody would take wrong, and then it would be a nightmare. Am I alone in feeling that?”
Well, Glenn, I’m pretty sure you’re not alone. But I don’t think there are a whole lot of mature, rational, intelligent people in the boat with you.
As reported on the Think Progress website, in the process of leading a discussion about Biden’s remarks, O’Reilly said this to one of his guests, whose name I didn’t catch:
“Now you got to feel sorry for us white folks here, because I’m telling you now I’m afraid to say anything. You know, you’re an articulate guy, doctor, but I’m never going to say that. You’re a smart guy. Is that bad if I say you’re a smart guy? … Yes, absolutely, instead of black and white Americans coming together, white Americans are terrified. They’re terrified. Now we can’t even say you’re articulate? We can’t even give you guys compliments because they may be taken as condescension?”
Yeah, I know. Where to begin?
O’Reilly is guilty of pretend-indignation. He pretends he doesn’t understand the difference between condescension (expressing amazement that a black person is articulate) and a genuine compliment. “Is it bad if I say you’re a smart guy?”
Come on, Bill. It’s all about context, and stop acting like you don’t know it. The times when it’s okay to tell a black person he’s a smart guy are exactly the same times when it’s okay to tell anyone the same thing.
“Hey, Bob, you’re a smart guy—settle this bet for us.”
“You bought Microsoft at $5? You’re a genius!”
“Say, Ted—brilliant work on the Henderson account.”
Otherwise, the subject isn’t going to come up very often. Yet judging from his words, O’Reilly is constantly having this internal struggle: “Oh, no—this guy’s black and I’m white. Must…resist…Tourette’s Condescending Compliment Syndrome…”
Most people are just content to have normal grown-up conversation. That includes the “white people” O’Reilly presumptuously claims to speak for. (Honestly—suggesting that anyone should “feel sorry for white folks” because he's a case of arrested development?)
But let’s get Glenn Beck’s two half-cents in here, too. In the course of a similar discussion on his CNN program, he said
“I don’t have a lot of African-American friends, and I think part of it is because I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation, and I would say something that somebody would take wrong, and then it would be a nightmare. Am I alone in feeling that?”
Well, Glenn, I’m pretty sure you’re not alone. But I don’t think there are a whole lot of mature, rational, intelligent people in the boat with you.
Cracker Barrel Isn't Sending Out $50 Gift Certificates, Either
Believe it or not, back in high school I was somewhat conservative. I mean, not in the modern-day Evil Dick Cheney sort of way, but in the sense that I tried to err on the side of what I believed to be the biblically right thing to do. I remember in senior English taking the anti-abortion side in a class debate, and later that year listing “atheist scientists” as my pet peeve in the senior edition of the school paper.
Then I grew up. Although, admittedly, it took me a while.
Anyway, a high school friend of mine died recently, a victim of breast cancer. She was the yearbook editor when I was the newspaper editor, and, like many high school friends, we didn’t keep in touch after graduation. I heard about it from one of the few friends I do keep in touch with, and because he sent his email to several of my classmates at once, I suddenly began hearing from guys I hadn’t heard from for years.
We had one of those “Reply All” mailfests going one morning. Goofy stuff, mostly, bulletin-board style wit. Then one of the guys attached that bogus Andy Rooney column that’s been floating around the internet for years, the one where all manner of reactionary right-wing horseshit is attributed to the “60 Minutes” curmudgeon. To be fair, my classmate included the line “If you don’t like this, feel free to delete it.”
Well, sure, I could have just deleted it, but I thought it’d be a good opportunity to set the record straight. I went to Snopes.com, found the page debunking the bogus story in about 20 seconds (I don’t know why I’m the only person capable of doing this), and sent the link out as a Reply All to my classmates.
And that was the last I’ve heard from any of them.
Then I grew up. Although, admittedly, it took me a while.
Anyway, a high school friend of mine died recently, a victim of breast cancer. She was the yearbook editor when I was the newspaper editor, and, like many high school friends, we didn’t keep in touch after graduation. I heard about it from one of the few friends I do keep in touch with, and because he sent his email to several of my classmates at once, I suddenly began hearing from guys I hadn’t heard from for years.
We had one of those “Reply All” mailfests going one morning. Goofy stuff, mostly, bulletin-board style wit. Then one of the guys attached that bogus Andy Rooney column that’s been floating around the internet for years, the one where all manner of reactionary right-wing horseshit is attributed to the “60 Minutes” curmudgeon. To be fair, my classmate included the line “If you don’t like this, feel free to delete it.”
Well, sure, I could have just deleted it, but I thought it’d be a good opportunity to set the record straight. I went to Snopes.com, found the page debunking the bogus story in about 20 seconds (I don’t know why I’m the only person capable of doing this), and sent the link out as a Reply All to my classmates.
And that was the last I’ve heard from any of them.
Could Have Been Brighter
Some people never learn, and some people learn the hard way. The lesson, of course, is that unless there’s a damn good reason to refer to a person’s race (or, more accurately, racial classification, since the concept itself is of interest mainly to compulsive categorizers), then one shouldn’t refer to it at all.
Especially if one wants to have one’s presidential campaign taken seriously.
A few weeks ago Joe Biden decided he would pay Barack Obama this bizarre compliment: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Wow, the first one, huh? Articulate, is he? Bright, too? And clean? I expected him to follow up with “And he doesn’t wear those baggy jeans that slide halfway down his drawers.”
You don’t have to be all that articulate or bright either one to read between those lines. Either Biden doesn’t consider past presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to be mainstream African-Americans, or he doesn’t think much of their brightness, articulateness, and cleanliness. (Sharpton’s bemused response to Biden’s remark was “I take a bath every day.”)
This has been covered from every angle all over the blogs, but the fact is that Biden’s remark made him seem surprised that an African-American (who happens to be serving in the United States Senate) can be bright and articulate. To avoid coming off like such a doofus, he could have said something like this: “I think Barack has articulated his position on Iraq very clearly” or “I think Barack is one of the brightest young senators serving today.”
I’m not sure it’s possible to salvage the “clean” remark. Maybe “Barack never skimps on the Irish Spring” or something.
Tough lesson, Joe. But if you want to pay someone a compliment, “articulate” doesn’t cut it. Articulate is the default, the current pretend-emperor notwithstanding.
* * *
Coming soon: intellectual heavyweights and self-appointed Caucasian spokespersons Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck weigh in with their cogent insights.
Especially if one wants to have one’s presidential campaign taken seriously.
A few weeks ago Joe Biden decided he would pay Barack Obama this bizarre compliment: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Wow, the first one, huh? Articulate, is he? Bright, too? And clean? I expected him to follow up with “And he doesn’t wear those baggy jeans that slide halfway down his drawers.”
You don’t have to be all that articulate or bright either one to read between those lines. Either Biden doesn’t consider past presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to be mainstream African-Americans, or he doesn’t think much of their brightness, articulateness, and cleanliness. (Sharpton’s bemused response to Biden’s remark was “I take a bath every day.”)
This has been covered from every angle all over the blogs, but the fact is that Biden’s remark made him seem surprised that an African-American (who happens to be serving in the United States Senate) can be bright and articulate. To avoid coming off like such a doofus, he could have said something like this: “I think Barack has articulated his position on Iraq very clearly” or “I think Barack is one of the brightest young senators serving today.”
I’m not sure it’s possible to salvage the “clean” remark. Maybe “Barack never skimps on the Irish Spring” or something.
Tough lesson, Joe. But if you want to pay someone a compliment, “articulate” doesn’t cut it. Articulate is the default, the current pretend-emperor notwithstanding.
* * *
Coming soon: intellectual heavyweights and self-appointed Caucasian spokespersons Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck weigh in with their cogent insights.
Five Months Later
September 2?!
My last entry was on September 2?!
Fortunately, nothing much noteworthy has happened since then, except the Democrats took back both houses of Congress, a Republican representative from Florida got caught pursuing a young page, a woman became Speaker of the House, John Kerry flubbed a joke that GOP nutbars and the mainstream media pretended not to understand, a Colorado evangelist was forced out of the closet and then forced back in, 363 tons of our tax dollars disappeared because some genius decided to send it to Iraq in the form of cash, and George W. Bush continued to position himself as the emperor of America—a delusional, evil emperor hell-bent on turning the entire Middle East into a gigantic graveyard with oil pumps among the tombstones.
Yeah, nothing to write about there.
On the other hand, no one’s expressed any curiosity about where I’ve been, so it might be some time before anyone notices I’m back.
Shorter and more frequent entries—that’s the ticket. And with that, it’s time to relaunch the Runes.
My last entry was on September 2?!
Fortunately, nothing much noteworthy has happened since then, except the Democrats took back both houses of Congress, a Republican representative from Florida got caught pursuing a young page, a woman became Speaker of the House, John Kerry flubbed a joke that GOP nutbars and the mainstream media pretended not to understand, a Colorado evangelist was forced out of the closet and then forced back in, 363 tons of our tax dollars disappeared because some genius decided to send it to Iraq in the form of cash, and George W. Bush continued to position himself as the emperor of America—a delusional, evil emperor hell-bent on turning the entire Middle East into a gigantic graveyard with oil pumps among the tombstones.
Yeah, nothing to write about there.
On the other hand, no one’s expressed any curiosity about where I’ve been, so it might be some time before anyone notices I’m back.
Shorter and more frequent entries—that’s the ticket. And with that, it’s time to relaunch the Runes.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Christmas in September
Some people will believe anything.
And the sad part is, believing anything often makes them do silly things.
For instance: Word is going around that the American Civil Liberties Union “hates Christmas” and is trying to “get rid” of the holiday. This came as a surprise to me, since I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU and I try to stay up on all the things we allegedly hate, but there it was in black and white, at the bottom of one of those multi-forwarded emails that I normally trash without opening. But the subject line was “Christmas Card List,” so I thought maybe someone was collecting names of people who might need some cheering up during the holiday season.
Which is still almost four months away, but you know, it’s never too early to do something nice.
But no, this email had entirely different motives. Someone thought it would be hilarious if all the email recipients were to send the ACLU a Christmas card. Here’s the relevant text from the email:
Want to have some fun this CHRISTMAS ? Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD! Be sure to add them to your list! As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of this holiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN, card to brighten up their nasty, dark, sad, little world. Make sure it says "Merry Christmas" on it.
Now, again, as an ACLU member, I wasn’t aware I lived a nasty, dark, sad little world—or at least I wasn’t aware that the dark sad parts of it were a direct result of belonging to the ACLU. But you don’t even need much more than grade-school reading skills to see that the motivation behind this letter is not to brighten up anyone’s world. No, the motivation is revealed in the next to last paragraph:
Two tons of Christmas cards will freeze their operations because they won't know if any are regular mail containing contributions. So spend 39 cents and tell the ACLU to leave Christmas alone.
Ah, so that’s their fiendish plan! I almost hate to break it to the Christmas Card Guerillas that most of us use the pre-addressed envelopes when we’re making our contributions, though I suppose it’s possible that some first-timer might send a thousand dollars cash in a red envelope with sparkly silver ink. Seems like a long shot, though.
Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. Anything you’ve heard about the ACLU “hating Christmas” is an example of the Straw Man Fallacy, which occurs when someone deliberately misrepresents someone else’s position in order to argue against that fictional position. In this case, someone (probably someone of the Rush Limbaugh ilk) has created the “Christmas-hating ACLU” straw man in order to get people riled up (and, continuing the metaphor, to burn down the straw man).
Let’s look at it rationally. Christmas is a tradition celebrated all across the country. For some people, it’s strictly a religious observance. For others, it’s a secular celebration. For most, it’s a combination of the two. The ACLU neither has the power, nor would want the power, to prevent anyone from celebrating Christmas.
Celebrating Christmas, you might say, is one of the civil liberties the ACLU would be interested in protecting. If the government tried to tell you you couldn’t celebrate Christmas, for instance, the ACLU would defend you.
I’m going to quote Fran Quigley, executive director of the ACLU of Indiana, who has an excellent essay about this very subject on the national website. Says Mr Quigley:
For example, the Alliance Defense Fund celebrates the season with an "It's OK to say Merry Christmas" campaign, implying that the ACLU has challenged such holiday greetings…The website WorldNetDaily touts a book claiming "a thorough and virulent anti-Christmas campaign is being waged today by liberal activists and ACLU fanatics." The site's magazine has suggested there will be ACLU efforts to remove "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency, fire military chaplains, and expunge all references to God in America's founding documents. Of course, there is no "Merry Christmas" lawsuit, nor is there any ACLU litigation about U.S. currency, military chaplains, etc. But the facts are not important to these groups, because their real message is this: By protecting the freedom of Muslims, Jews, and other non-Christians through preventing government entanglement with religion, the ACLU is somehow infringing on the rights of those with majority religious beliefs.
Here’s my favorite part of Mr Quigley’s essay, mainly because there’s another straw man out there that would have you believe the ACLU is somehow an anti-Christian organization:
As part of our justice mission, we work hard to protect the rights of free religious expression for all people, including Christians. For example, we recently defended the First Amendment rights of a Baptist minister to preach his message on public streets in southern Indiana. The ACLU intervened on behalf of a Christian valedictorian in a Michigan high school, which agreed to stop censoring religious yearbook entries, and supported the rights of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at their school.
So—if you’ve received the “Christmas Card List” and have been tempted to do your part to freeze ACLU operations, please consider this instead. No one is trying to do away with Christmas. No one has the power to do away with Christmas. And yes, the ACLU defends some causes that are highly unpopular, but keep in mind that their guide is the United States Constitution, and that someday you might be the one who needs your liberties defended.
And, I don’t know—instead of spending 39 cents on postage for an ACLU Christmas card, maybe you could give it to a Salvation Army bellringer. Maybe you could hand it to a homeless person who asks you for change. Maybe you could send it to your favorite charity.
Any of those ideas would actually make a more positive impact on the world.
And the sad part is, believing anything often makes them do silly things.
For instance: Word is going around that the American Civil Liberties Union “hates Christmas” and is trying to “get rid” of the holiday. This came as a surprise to me, since I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU and I try to stay up on all the things we allegedly hate, but there it was in black and white, at the bottom of one of those multi-forwarded emails that I normally trash without opening. But the subject line was “Christmas Card List,” so I thought maybe someone was collecting names of people who might need some cheering up during the holiday season.
Which is still almost four months away, but you know, it’s never too early to do something nice.
But no, this email had entirely different motives. Someone thought it would be hilarious if all the email recipients were to send the ACLU a Christmas card. Here’s the relevant text from the email:
Want to have some fun this CHRISTMAS ? Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD! Be sure to add them to your list! As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of this holiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN, card to brighten up their nasty, dark, sad, little world. Make sure it says "Merry Christmas" on it.
Now, again, as an ACLU member, I wasn’t aware I lived a nasty, dark, sad little world—or at least I wasn’t aware that the dark sad parts of it were a direct result of belonging to the ACLU. But you don’t even need much more than grade-school reading skills to see that the motivation behind this letter is not to brighten up anyone’s world. No, the motivation is revealed in the next to last paragraph:
Two tons of Christmas cards will freeze their operations because they won't know if any are regular mail containing contributions. So spend 39 cents and tell the ACLU to leave Christmas alone.
Ah, so that’s their fiendish plan! I almost hate to break it to the Christmas Card Guerillas that most of us use the pre-addressed envelopes when we’re making our contributions, though I suppose it’s possible that some first-timer might send a thousand dollars cash in a red envelope with sparkly silver ink. Seems like a long shot, though.
Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. Anything you’ve heard about the ACLU “hating Christmas” is an example of the Straw Man Fallacy, which occurs when someone deliberately misrepresents someone else’s position in order to argue against that fictional position. In this case, someone (probably someone of the Rush Limbaugh ilk) has created the “Christmas-hating ACLU” straw man in order to get people riled up (and, continuing the metaphor, to burn down the straw man).
Let’s look at it rationally. Christmas is a tradition celebrated all across the country. For some people, it’s strictly a religious observance. For others, it’s a secular celebration. For most, it’s a combination of the two. The ACLU neither has the power, nor would want the power, to prevent anyone from celebrating Christmas.
Celebrating Christmas, you might say, is one of the civil liberties the ACLU would be interested in protecting. If the government tried to tell you you couldn’t celebrate Christmas, for instance, the ACLU would defend you.
I’m going to quote Fran Quigley, executive director of the ACLU of Indiana, who has an excellent essay about this very subject on the national website. Says Mr Quigley:
For example, the Alliance Defense Fund celebrates the season with an "It's OK to say Merry Christmas" campaign, implying that the ACLU has challenged such holiday greetings…The website WorldNetDaily touts a book claiming "a thorough and virulent anti-Christmas campaign is being waged today by liberal activists and ACLU fanatics." The site's magazine has suggested there will be ACLU efforts to remove "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency, fire military chaplains, and expunge all references to God in America's founding documents. Of course, there is no "Merry Christmas" lawsuit, nor is there any ACLU litigation about U.S. currency, military chaplains, etc. But the facts are not important to these groups, because their real message is this: By protecting the freedom of Muslims, Jews, and other non-Christians through preventing government entanglement with religion, the ACLU is somehow infringing on the rights of those with majority religious beliefs.
Here’s my favorite part of Mr Quigley’s essay, mainly because there’s another straw man out there that would have you believe the ACLU is somehow an anti-Christian organization:
As part of our justice mission, we work hard to protect the rights of free religious expression for all people, including Christians. For example, we recently defended the First Amendment rights of a Baptist minister to preach his message on public streets in southern Indiana. The ACLU intervened on behalf of a Christian valedictorian in a Michigan high school, which agreed to stop censoring religious yearbook entries, and supported the rights of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at their school.
So—if you’ve received the “Christmas Card List” and have been tempted to do your part to freeze ACLU operations, please consider this instead. No one is trying to do away with Christmas. No one has the power to do away with Christmas. And yes, the ACLU defends some causes that are highly unpopular, but keep in mind that their guide is the United States Constitution, and that someday you might be the one who needs your liberties defended.
And, I don’t know—instead of spending 39 cents on postage for an ACLU Christmas card, maybe you could give it to a Salvation Army bellringer. Maybe you could hand it to a homeless person who asks you for change. Maybe you could send it to your favorite charity.
Any of those ideas would actually make a more positive impact on the world.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Brought To You By The Letter F
There are too many assclowns in positions of authority in this country, and believe it or not this time I’m not even talking about the rat bastards in the Bush administration. This time I’m talking about two separate incidents involving the people in charge of personalized license plates, one here in Iowa, the other in Ohio.
Here in Iowa, the Department of Transportation is in the process of revoking a license plate it originally awarded in 2001 because one man found it offensive.
Even if you didn’t hear the rest of the story, you’d think that was absurd, right? A guy requests the vanity plates, IDOT awards them, the guy drives around for five years (presumably not just up and down his driveway), and then suddenly, magically, his vanity message becomes offensive enough to warrant revocation.
Not because hundreds of people deluged IDOT with complaints, mind you. Because one person took offense.
John Miller of Boone owns the car in question. He drives a 1966 Corvair, which was featured rather prominently in Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed. Miller’s license plate reads “F NADER.”
You can look at that a couple of ways. You can look at it as a playful swat at Nader: “Hey, Ralph, I’m still driving your ‘unsafe’ Corvair 40 years later.” You could also look at it as a not-so-playful message to the candidate who siphoned off enough votes from Al Gore in 2000 to throw the election into chaos. I don’t know John Miller’s politics, but since his hobby is restoring old Corvairs I suspect it’s the first reason.
Either way, Joel Paulson of Ames caught a glimpse of Miller’s car one day, and promptly complained to IDOT that the license plate was in poor taste. When this story first came out, Paulson reportedly said he shouldn’t have to explain to a child what F NADER means.
In the first place, if the kid’s old enough, he already knows what F NADER means. If he’s younger, there’s nothing about the license plate that would make him curious enough to ask. And if he asked anyway and Joel Paulson didn’t want to explain that F is sometimes used as an abbreviation for a word “you’re not old enough to hear,” then the proper answer—listen up, Joel—would have been “Why, I’ll bet that means Fred Nader. Or maybe Frank. How many F-names can you think of, sport?”
But no, that would have been too easy. You don’t get your name in the paper that way.
Paulson had this little gem of a quote in the Des Moines Register this week: “I wonder how he’d like it if someone drove around Boone with a license plate that said ‘F JOHN MILLER?”
Good question. Of course, it would mean that somebody at IDOT approved a license plate that’s five or six letters over the limit—which is feasible considering that so much of the department’s resources are devoted to making the world safe from the letter F.
John Miller plans to appeal the revocation, as he should, and will be represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Randall Wilson of the ACLU told the Register “The license plate isn’t obscene or vulgar by any modern standard.” Bingo. A Joel Paulson would have to take the extra step in his imagination to make it obscene, which he obviously did. And when you have government agencies trying to protect us from our own imaginations, you’ve got government agencies with entirely too much power.
The Ohio case is similar. A 74-year-old woman named Pat Niple has had her personalized license plate for ten years (no, it doesn’t say NIPLE—jeez, don’t jump to conclusions), and now the state is saying it’s obscene.
Her plate reads NWTF, because she and her late husband owned Northwood Tree Farm.
But because a generation of IMers and text messagers use it to mean something else, Ohio says Ms Niple’s plates have to go.
WTF?
I’ve never seen “NWTF” in an online conversation. I assume the N stands for “Now,” although I can’t be sure. In any event, once again, the reader has to take the extra step. If he already knows what it means, he can chuckle or be offended or whatever he wants—but he can’t blame someone else for his own interpretation.
I’m not sure civil servants should be put in a position of trying to determine what’s obscene, what’s acceptable, what won’t offend the self-righteous prigs of the world. But if they’re going to uphold people like Joel Paulson as the standard of sensitivity, maybe we should just go back to random numbers and letters.
Here in Iowa, the Department of Transportation is in the process of revoking a license plate it originally awarded in 2001 because one man found it offensive.
Even if you didn’t hear the rest of the story, you’d think that was absurd, right? A guy requests the vanity plates, IDOT awards them, the guy drives around for five years (presumably not just up and down his driveway), and then suddenly, magically, his vanity message becomes offensive enough to warrant revocation.
Not because hundreds of people deluged IDOT with complaints, mind you. Because one person took offense.
John Miller of Boone owns the car in question. He drives a 1966 Corvair, which was featured rather prominently in Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed. Miller’s license plate reads “F NADER.”
You can look at that a couple of ways. You can look at it as a playful swat at Nader: “Hey, Ralph, I’m still driving your ‘unsafe’ Corvair 40 years later.” You could also look at it as a not-so-playful message to the candidate who siphoned off enough votes from Al Gore in 2000 to throw the election into chaos. I don’t know John Miller’s politics, but since his hobby is restoring old Corvairs I suspect it’s the first reason.
Either way, Joel Paulson of Ames caught a glimpse of Miller’s car one day, and promptly complained to IDOT that the license plate was in poor taste. When this story first came out, Paulson reportedly said he shouldn’t have to explain to a child what F NADER means.
In the first place, if the kid’s old enough, he already knows what F NADER means. If he’s younger, there’s nothing about the license plate that would make him curious enough to ask. And if he asked anyway and Joel Paulson didn’t want to explain that F is sometimes used as an abbreviation for a word “you’re not old enough to hear,” then the proper answer—listen up, Joel—would have been “Why, I’ll bet that means Fred Nader. Or maybe Frank. How many F-names can you think of, sport?”
But no, that would have been too easy. You don’t get your name in the paper that way.
Paulson had this little gem of a quote in the Des Moines Register this week: “I wonder how he’d like it if someone drove around Boone with a license plate that said ‘F JOHN MILLER?”
Good question. Of course, it would mean that somebody at IDOT approved a license plate that’s five or six letters over the limit—which is feasible considering that so much of the department’s resources are devoted to making the world safe from the letter F.
John Miller plans to appeal the revocation, as he should, and will be represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Randall Wilson of the ACLU told the Register “The license plate isn’t obscene or vulgar by any modern standard.” Bingo. A Joel Paulson would have to take the extra step in his imagination to make it obscene, which he obviously did. And when you have government agencies trying to protect us from our own imaginations, you’ve got government agencies with entirely too much power.
The Ohio case is similar. A 74-year-old woman named Pat Niple has had her personalized license plate for ten years (no, it doesn’t say NIPLE—jeez, don’t jump to conclusions), and now the state is saying it’s obscene.
Her plate reads NWTF, because she and her late husband owned Northwood Tree Farm.
But because a generation of IMers and text messagers use it to mean something else, Ohio says Ms Niple’s plates have to go.
WTF?
I’ve never seen “NWTF” in an online conversation. I assume the N stands for “Now,” although I can’t be sure. In any event, once again, the reader has to take the extra step. If he already knows what it means, he can chuckle or be offended or whatever he wants—but he can’t blame someone else for his own interpretation.
I’m not sure civil servants should be put in a position of trying to determine what’s obscene, what’s acceptable, what won’t offend the self-righteous prigs of the world. But if they’re going to uphold people like Joel Paulson as the standard of sensitivity, maybe we should just go back to random numbers and letters.
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